CINCINNATI (July 20, 2026) — GE Aerospace (NYSE: GE) and Shield AI have successfully completed integration, actuation, and engine light-off testing of the advanced Axisymmetric Vectoring Exhaust Nozzle (AVEN) for Shield AI’s X-BAT aircraft, a critical milestone in the program’s path to vertical flight. Engineers from both companies modified and integrated the AVEN into GE Aerospace’s F110-GE-129E engine, then completed functional checkouts and engine light-off to verify system performa...

Today’s Music Monday is an etymological road trip from Paul Simon’s 1983 album Hearts and Bones . The album was a commercial failure relative to his other works, but it happens to be one of my favourites. This cheeky song is mixed in with some of his most beautiful tunes. Clara and I were lucky to find an original LP pressing at a charity shop this year. Graceland is one of my favourite albums of all time, but I find myself playing Hearts and Bones and his earlier One Trick Pony ...

As I mentioned in my IndieWeb Book Club post , I first read Fromm’s book more than 20 years ago. I was in my early high school years when I stumbled upon his work and was immediately intrigued by his way of looking at the world. The fact that he was not “just” a philosopher but also a psychologist and a sociologist meant his ideas felt more concrete and applicable in today’s world, even though his book was more than 30 years old at the time and is half a century old now. In reading T...

Here’s the big idea in Keith Johnstone’s book Impro : Children are naturally creative, but are violently formed into repressed adults by Western culture and education The process of becoming more creative and expressive is largely a process of unlearning these habits of repression Improv — improvisational comedy — is thus not just the skeleton key for learning to act, but for unlocking a more authentically human way of life This take doesn’t sound particularly original, bu...

Niagara by Frederic Edwin Church, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at a setback for California Forever, a $500 million artillery shell plant not producing any shells, the difficulty of recycling EV batteries, manufacturing wire harnesses, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items this week...

By AI Platform’s Model Runtime team and Inference team Introduction Most organizations consume LLMs through hosted APIs. Netflix went further — we run the full stack ourselves, from model deployment through inference, inside our existing production environment rather than a separate ML silo. Some of those decisions weren’t obvious, and a few revealed their trade-offs only under production load. This post focuses on the choices where alternatives were seriously considered: engine select...

NOAA’s Dealing with Disruptive Behaviors describes ten different kinds of people who can disrupt meetings and gives advice for handling each. I’ve been a big fan of this taxonomy since I first encountered it several years ago, but going through it again yesterday, I realized that there’s a fair bit of overlap between some of the types. In order to slim it down, I grouped them as follows: Aggressive Assertive Passive People-focused Blowfish, Dolphin Sea Otter, Flounder Task-...

When people think of legacy modernization, most folks aren't imagining the target environment will be Java 8. But this was the challenge facing Nik Malykhin when he needed to run a Java 1.5 codebase on today's hardware. His early use of LLMs gave plausible answers that did not hold up in the codebase. Progress came when he grounded the process in evidence, using AI to support analysis, validation in a stable Docker environment, and gradual refactoring protec...

Yup. Goat-proofing the chicken door really worked a treat. FML. 🤦🏼‍♂️ Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Yup. Goat-proofing the chicken door really worked a treat. FML. 🤦🏼‍♂️ Tha...

In 2021, the United Nations proclaimed July 20th as International Moon Day , via the resolution  76/76  on “international cooperation in the peaceful uses of outer space”. Some key goals of the day are to promote awareness about our Moon’s unique scientific and cultural importance as well as how countries worldwide are exploring it. To that end, I present a curated webpage of linked, free resources for people from all backgrounds to learn about our Moon as well as dive into specific e...

Last week, someone paid me to review their form flow. One thing they wanted advice about was interruption pages. Coincidentally, the following day the GOV.UK Design System added the interruption page pattern. Interruption pages are designed to pause the user within a journey - usually to warn them about a possible mistake or give them important information before they continue. Here’s an example from the GOV.UK Design System: It has: An h1 heading to ask a simple question ...

Memory Safety’s Hardest Problem Jul 20, 2026 Uplifting a lobsters comment for easier reference. The central memory safety counter example, the hardest case to solve, doesn’t have anything to do with destructors or heap: const std = @import ( "std" ); const E = union ( enum ) { a: u128 , b: [] const u8 , }; pub fn main () void { const bad_addr: u128 = @intFromPtr ( & main); var e: E = .{ .b = "hello" }; const ...

Stripe employs 8,198 people as of December 2025, up from 5,857 in 2023, a 40% jump in two years, based on Revelio Labs tracking. The company set a public target of about 10,000 staff by the end of 2025. This post covers Stripe’s headcount by year, layoffs, department and office breakdowns, salaries, and how it stacks up against PayPal, Block, and Adyen. Stripe Employee Statistics – TL;DR Stripe has 8,198 tracked employees as of December 2025, per Revelio Labs, against a company target ...

I was born in the USA. Many tongues call me "American": Italian ( americano ), French ( Américain ), German ( Amerikaner ), Dutch ( Amerikaan ), Afrikaans ( Amerikaner ), Japanese ( アメリカ人, amerika-jin ), Filipino ( Amerikano ), Hebrew (אמריקני), Arabic (أمريكي), Portuguese ( americano ), Russian ( американец ), and Hindi ( अमरीकी, Amreeki ). I grew up in Southern California. Many of my friends were zeroeth-generation immigrants from Mexico. Weren't...

Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3 this morning, describing it as their "most capable model to date, with 2.8 trillion parameters". It's currently available via their website and API, but an open weight release is promised "by July 27, 2026". Moonshot are calling this the first "open 3T-class model" (I guess they're rounding 2.8 trillion up to 3 trillion), taking the crown from DeepSeek's 1.6T v4 Pro . Their self-reported benchmarks have K3 mostly beating Claude Opus 4.8 max and...

Hello! I’ve been working on a Django site recently, and I decided to use SQLite as the database. When I was getting started with using SQLite as database for a website I read a bunch of blog posts about how it is totally fine to use SQLite in production for a small site and I think it is totally fine, but what I did not fully appreciate is that SQLite is still a database, databases are complicated, and I do not know a lot about operating databases. So here are a couple of small things I...

the direction of music; the music of direction. the direction of music; the music of direction. the direction of music; the music of direction.

[written by claude.ai with brewster leveraging the new archive.org Supreme Court collection] Eight years before Jack Valenti called the VCR a “Boston strangler,” America’s publishers told the Supreme Court that the office copier would extinguish the printed word. A field guide to the doom prophecies of Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States (1973–75) — verbatim from the briefs. “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston st...

Email, one of the most pervasive and enduring technologies of computer networking, was invented in about a dozen places by dozens of people in the 1960s. It's hard to lay out a clear history of the technology because it's just so obvious—pretty much as soon as more than one person could use a computer, there was some kind of mail facility. These ranged from mainframe-centric systems where all of the users of a single computer could write messages to each other, to PC-centric systems where work...

Nutan Limaye and Thore Husfeldt guest post on the new deterministic parallel algorithm for bipartite perfect matching by Abhranil Chatterjee, Sumanta Ghosh, Rohit Gurjar, Roshan Raj and Thomas Thierauf. The post will try to explain three main things about the result. What is the result? Why is it important? And finally, how did the authors prove it? We will assume that the reader is an undergraduate student in CS (i.e., the reader knows basics of discrete mathematics, linear algebra, and alg...

A delayed education on the trenches and scales of suffering A delayed education on the trenches and scales of suffering

0.0 Context Setting It’s Wednesday, July 15th 2026 in Portland, Oregon, and the England football team have just finished being the archetypal England football team. (Only it’s not. Now it’s Thursday.) 0.1 Events: How People Work, Live! ... with Erika Hall Short version: it’s your last call to register to attend How People Work, Live! ... with Erika Hall for Friday, 17 July, at 11am Pacific. Following last week’s How People Work with Matt Jukes, I’m super excited to have...

A few years ago, a friend of mine was stuck. He needed to quickly process over a hundred high-quality images according to a complicated sequence. He was using Photoshop, but it was going to take him days. Initially, he asked for my help, could I do the manual labor? I spent 15 minutes writing a script with ImageMagick that processed all the images in seconds, but in a completely automated way. When my kids were young, instead of helping them study algebra and grammar, I wrote small JavaScript ...